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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 08:35
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Dan Lucas wrote:
For some reason they are never quite as good as the ones my mother used to make for me and my sisters when I was a small child
That's because of the nostalgia topping laid over the pancakes long after they had been eaten. It's irreplacable, I heard.
| | | | Dan Lucas 
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
It turns out to be a busy morning, with one project that was not expected until the 20th coming in early and slightly larger than estimated. I negotiate a reasonable deadline for this one and shift my attention to a different job that has come in on time, but a couple of thousand characters short of what was estimated. No big deal; I will be busy enough over the next few days. I have a soft spot for this particular end-client, which is a small but rapidly growing regional company.
A... See more It turns out to be a busy morning, with one project that was not expected until the 20th coming in early and slightly larger than estimated. I negotiate a reasonable deadline for this one and shift my attention to a different job that has come in on time, but a couple of thousand characters short of what was estimated. No big deal; I will be busy enough over the next few days. I have a soft spot for this particular end-client, which is a small but rapidly growing regional company.
As I write this, the potential fly in the ointment - a job that may be quite large and that needs to be done by Friday - has yet to arrive. Hopefully it will be well below estimate and I will be able to handle both this and another job with a Friday deadline. If it comes in above estimate I will have a problem.
None of the items remaining in my schedule relate to kessan tanshin (決算短信), the summary of earnings that I mentioned in an earlier post. The time for releasing Q3 filings to the world has already passed.
Some of these jobs are presentation materials for the earnings meeting (決算説明会資料) related to the third quarter, or transcripts of the question and answer sessions, and these companies obviously have a March year-end (their third quarter ended on December 31). As mentioned previously, if you're involved in financial translation from Japanese to English you're going to be very busy in April and May, because that is when the bulk of listed companies announce their results.
However, most of the projects remaining in my schedule are related to shareholder meetings, such as the notice of convocation (招集通知) for a company that I have on my to-do list for today. That end-client has a December year-end, so their ordinary general meeting of shareholders (定時株主総会) will be held in the second half of March.
The document inviting shareholders to that meeting and describing the proposals that will be set before them is currently being prepared. Of course that means translation for me, but also a good deal of other DTP and other work for the agency, because these documents in their original Japanese form tend to be fairly glossy and have complex layouts.
The quarterly bulges caused by the companies with a March year-end are what make Japanese financial translation challenging: you get a lot of work in a short space of time and you need to be very organized and totally reliable. However, it is documents for companies with a year-end other than March that fill in the gaps between these bulges. December is a common one, but for some reason retail companies often have a February year-end - I have never actually looked into why that is the case. I used to sit next to an analyst who covered retail stocks, so he always used to get busy with kessan season a month before the rest of us did.
Anyway, on the subject of February, today is Valentine's Day, which in Japan is a day on which women give chocolates to men, rather than the other way round. While this may sound irredeemably chauvinistic (and probably was intended to be that way initially) I should point out that there is a "return match" in the form of White Day on the 14th of March, when men give chocolates to women. So it evens out in the end. I myself have fought my way through the crush of a Ginza department store on the evening of the 13th of March, trying to snag one of the last boxes of Pierre Marcolini for the girlfriend.
These are ones I received this morning. They were made by a local Welsh chocolatier who has been going for a few years now. Her products are thoughtfully considered, well blended, beautifully textured, not too sweet, and generally delicious. I'm so happy to see that the business appears to be doing well.
Dan
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| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Yesterday the afternoon was disrupted in a positive way by the need to visit an elderly relative for a party to celebrate a major birthday. That went well, but it meant I had to scramble in the evening to complete my quota for the day, which was around 4000 characters. Nevertheless, all done and submitted on time, as usual.
Today I have a 5000-character job to submit by midnight, as well as another project of 2000 characters. I get up this morning and check my email at 6 AM to find ... See more Yesterday the afternoon was disrupted in a positive way by the need to visit an elderly relative for a party to celebrate a major birthday. That went well, but it meant I had to scramble in the evening to complete my quota for the day, which was around 4000 characters. Nevertheless, all done and submitted on time, as usual.
Today I have a 5000-character job to submit by midnight, as well as another project of 2000 characters. I get up this morning and check my email at 6 AM to find a message from the PM in charge of the job telling me that the volume for the latter is likely to be 5000 rather than 2000 characters.
She asks if I could handle the additional work if she stretches the deadline from 9 AM to 4:30 PM JST. This is one of these situations where being in a different time zone does not help. If I were in Japan, this would be a reasonable and useful extension: effectively a full working day. Here in the UK, I will be asleep for nearly all those hours, and so it does not really help at all.
Before I set off on my morning walk, I dash off a quick response to let her know that I cannot handle the excess 3000 characters today due to having another large job on at the same time. Although I do not spell it out, it would be very challenging to complete 10,000 characters in a single day. I suggest that I submit the 5000 characters on Saturday morning instead.
10 minutes later, as the dog and I are wending our way through the woodland, my phone pings. Unfortunately, due to the need to take the back end into account (essentially checking, editing, DTP) it will not be possible to extend the deadline in the way I suggest, she says. She will send me 2000 characters, as originally agreed, and divert the unexpected 3000 characters to a different freelancer. I apologize for the lack of flexibility and thank her for the work.
From my perspective, nothing has changed for the worse. If I were being negative I could say that I have lost out on an opportunity to grab another 3000 characters, but in this case there was no point in putting myself under the cosh. I will still have to complete 6000 or 7000 characters today, which will be tiring enough.
This incident also underlines the folly of thinking that we can do without agencies. I am a member of a certain translation group for Japanese-English freelancers, and one senior person on that list is completely dismissive of agencies, largely because he has worked in a very specialist area of translation for decades, and is resident in Japan (as I was for nearly 20 years, during which I worked entirely in finance, not translation). As one would expect, he has great connections and works exclusively direct clients, many of whom seem to be associated with the government or the legal system, but neither of these necessarily operate under the normal rules of business.
I take exception to his argument that freelancers will only survive if they find direct clients. If you can do that, fine, but it will limit you in terms of projects. If the job I mention above had been for a direct client, the unexpected increase in volume and my inability to handle that would have left the direct client scrambling. Unlike an agency, it is highly unlikely they would have a list of freelancers on whom they could call. And what about the associated tasks of checking the text, laying it out, DTP'ing it, talking with the printer, and so on? Does a company really want to maintain in-house staff to address such non-core functions? Most of the time the answer is no. That's why they outsource things.
The problem with this senior freelancer is that he seems not to accept (or simply does not understand, having been involved in a tiny niche for many decades without broader commercial experience) that most successful companies focus tightly on what they do, rather than expanding into peripheral functions. That does not mean that very large companies do not have anybody who can lay out a document or translate a text, but it means that those are precious internal resources. For example, the translator may be used for highly confidential internal documents only. The remainder gets outsourced. That's the way of the world.
I close with a flyer for a forthcoming event at St Brynach's church in Nevern, for those interested in dropping by. The church tower and its bells have undergone a very successful restoration over the past three or four years. Until recently, those bells had not been rung for 120 years, but during the process of refurbishment the church was donated bells from other places, and now it has an active bell-ringing team and a set (peal) of ten bells, which is an unusually large number. Apparently campanologists come from all over the country to have a go. Gosh.
[Edited at 2024-02-15 08:17 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Yesterday I completed and submitted one project of nearly 6000 characters, and nearly finished another of something less than 2000 characters. Unusually, the latter had a deadline of 18:00 JST today, so last night - feeling tired and not wanting to push it - I called it a day with a few hundred characters left. My first task this morning (after walking the dog) was to take my cup of coffee to the office and complete the remaining text.
After submitting that, well before the deadline... See more Yesterday I completed and submitted one project of nearly 6000 characters, and nearly finished another of something less than 2000 characters. Unusually, the latter had a deadline of 18:00 JST today, so last night - feeling tired and not wanting to push it - I called it a day with a few hundred characters left. My first task this morning (after walking the dog) was to take my cup of coffee to the office and complete the remaining text.
After submitting that, well before the deadline, I had a different client asked me to do just under 400 characters as an add-on to a job I completed about 10 days ago, and which has been rumbling through the back end of the process for the past week. She set a deadline of Monday morning, but hinted that earlier would be nice. With no other urgent tasks in my schedule, I grabbed the files, reacquainted myself with the project, and translated what needed to be done before uploading the results of the portal and letting her know. She was grateful for the quick turnaround.
What do I have now? Well, there are two projects in progress, both with a deadline of Monday morning and both, as it happens, related to projects that I have already submitted. It is fairly common for me to get projects in multiple tranches. For example, the first part of the presentation, followed by the second part a week later. Or the kessan tanshin one day, followed by the presentation materials for the analyst meeting two days later. Again, clients for financial translation (at least from Japanese to English) tend to focus on consistency and stability.
One of these projects is around 4500 characters and the other is about 3000. I will make a start on the former today, and get the bulk of it done if I can. Another client has threatened to send a small add-on project of about 500 characters today, but that may not materialize. Next week my schedule has two notices of convocation (招集通知), both quite sizeable, and both the remaining portions of projects I submitted this week or last week. I suspect both will come in smaller than expected but we will have to see.
After that there is just one quarterly busy season job left in the schedule. Clients often refer to the busy season as 決算繁忙期, even though not all the documents are actually kessan tanshin. I do have a project booked for the start of next month, which consists of materials related to battery monitoring ICs. That will be a refreshing change after four weeks of solid financial work. Because I watched the electronics and (to an extent) the SPE and semiconductor materials sectors for many years, I'm familiar with such industrial texts.
So there is a sense of things coming to an end. I don't know what will happen work-wise, and I do know that end clients are starting to get cautious about the business outlook, because those are the comments that I've been translating for the past few weeks. They will no doubt redouble their efforts to control expenses, which will probably mean less translation, and may even mean less financial translation. Let's see.
As part of what appears to be an ongoing series of contra-seasonal posts, I have added some pictures of the family picking bilberries a couple of years back on the slopes of Carningli, overlooking Newport. This is usually done in the first week of August (which is high summer) but picking these berries is a kind of inflection point for me, with its hint of autumn to come. Bilberries taste very good, but they produce a lot of juice...
[Edited at 2024-02-16 12:29 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Well, there you go. A few minutes after my previous post, I had a request from a regular client to accept a project of around 3000 characters for delivery on Tuesday. The end client is a well-known company and I myself visited it at least once when I worked in financial industry. I think I can fit it in, so I say yes.
As I am writing my reply, I get an email from a new PM at another regular client, offering me about 12,000 characters of interview material with individuals from a com... See more Well, there you go. A few minutes after my previous post, I had a request from a regular client to accept a project of around 3000 characters for delivery on Tuesday. The end client is a well-known company and I myself visited it at least once when I worked in financial industry. I think I can fit it in, so I say yes.
As I am writing my reply, I get an email from a new PM at another regular client, offering me about 12,000 characters of interview material with individuals from a company that I once used to know very well. Details are still scarce, but it would be towards the end of the month, if it were to materialize. I don't have much on in the final week of February, so I accept this one as well.
Such is freelancing life - you never know when work is going to suddenly land in your inbox with a dull thud.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Michael Hughes
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2022)
Japanese to English
+ ...
| Always look forward to my fix of Dan's blog | Feb 16 |
Just to say I'm really enjoying these Dan - very engaging writing style and lots of little nuggets of useful info here and there too, especially for J-E translators. Please keep doing them - I suspect there are several others like me on the forum for whom this has become a guilty pleasure.
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Shout-out to the wa-ei contingent | Feb 16 |
Michael Hughes wrote:
especially for J-E translators.
Yes, strong sense of an under-represented minority - trying to change that 👍
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Dan Lucas wrote:
to accept a project of around 3000 characters for delivery on Tuesday.
would 3,000 characters be? Roughly...
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | As a rule of thumb maybe 50%? | Feb 16 |
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL wrote: would 3,000 characters be? Roughly...
I would say 1,500 but I don't check English words output as, in the past eight years or so, I've only ever done one or two jobs quoted in words! When I was starting out I looked at a few samples and concluded that the word count varied from 40-60% of the character count, but was more likely to be in the mid- to lower part of that range.
To think of it a different way, an experienced translator should, I reckon, be able to average 1,000 characters an hour in their field, so 6,000 characters would be six hours of close concentration. A full and quite tiring day.
Dan
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Dan Lucas wrote:
I would say 1,500 but I don't check English words output as, in the past eight years or so, I've only ever done one or two jobs quoted in words! When I was starting out I looked at a few samples and concluded that the word count varied from 40-60% of the character count, but was more likely to be in the mid- to lower part of that range.
To think of it a different way, an experienced translator should, I reckon, be able to average 1,000 characters an hour in their field, so 6,000 characters would be six hours of close concentration. A full and quite tiring day.
Dan
for the explanation!
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Surely You're Joking, Mr. RWS! | Feb 17 |
When Natural Resources Wales felled the sterile plantation of conifers that was planted in the second half of the 20th century to largely replace the broadleaf woodland that had existed at Pentre Ifan for centuries, they left the long straight of the logging track in place, like a scar through the forest. The area on both sides of the track has been colonised by unbroken stands of willow and alder over the past twenty years, and repopulated by birds and other wildlife.
At this time ... See more When Natural Resources Wales felled the sterile plantation of conifers that was planted in the second half of the 20th century to largely replace the broadleaf woodland that had existed at Pentre Ifan for centuries, they left the long straight of the logging track in place, like a scar through the forest. The area on both sides of the track has been colonised by unbroken stands of willow and alder over the past twenty years, and repopulated by birds and other wildlife.
At this time of the year the vertical lines of the trees form leafless, featureless, colourless hedges between which the dog and I pass. There is never anything to look at - except this morning, there is. In one of those trees something gleams palely in the light of my torch, high above my head. I stop and peer up at it. Is it a resting moth? A dewy cobweb? I reach up with my stick and use it to bend the pliant sapling down far enough to grasp a branch and pull it closer for inspection.
In the fork of a twig is held a single ruffled feather, mostly white, but with some brown and orange near the tip. Given the lack of feathers on the ground it doesn't imply anything sinister, but despite that it seems curiously voyeuristic to take a photo, not to say impractical. I release the tree by stages to avoid disturbing the feather, and we head on.
(My weak excuse for including this picture is that this field borders Pentre Ifan wood, the fringe of which seen on the left, but really I just like the clouds)
Today I'm going to have a bit of a rant about a subject close to our hearts (one way or another) as freelance translators: CAT tools. As noted a few days ago, I am in the process of preparing and provisioning a new laptop to take over from the old, underpowered but reliable secondhand desktop PC that I bought for a pleasingly low sum of money in 2020.
The new laptop seems to be doing fine and is considerably quicker than my existing PC, as one would expect. One problem I have run into is that both of my activations for Trados Studio 2019 Freelance Plus are apparently already in use. I am the only user of the software, so it isn't that somebody else is having fun with segmentation rules and regex-based filters behind my back. It is quite possible that I activated one of my licences and left it on some other PC without deactivating it before I stopped using that machine.
No matter; this is what the online licensing reset function was designed for. Except, when I log into my SDL, sorry, RWS account to look at it, there is no way of telling which of the two licences listed there refers to the installation on my main PC. Crazy, I know. Do they just expect you to guess? No, apparently they expect you to know which is which merely by looking at the date, is what is implied by a response in the Trados forum. Given that I installed the software four years ago I feel this is asking a bit much.
Nevertheless, I attempt to follow the solution suggested by the RSWS representative, which is to deactivate Trados on my main PC, refresh the website, and see which one of the licences appears to be deactivated. That will be the one on my main PC. Then I would have to activate it again, and deactivate the other licence. Frankly, a bit user-hostile and annoying, but it sounds logical enough.
Of course, it isn't that simple. When I try to deactivate on my machine a dialogue box pops up saying "Error 202: lock info is not matching". At this point I open a support ticket and, commendably, I get a response within a couple of hours. Less commendably, the anonymous support person points me to a page on the website that sets out a process of 11 steps (yes, that is eleven) to deactivate the application off-line. It involves lots of flipping back and forth and copying and pasting of arbitrary fragments of text.
By now my patience and my energy for dealing with this kind of stupidity has run out, and I put it on my to-do list for tomorrow. Before I log off in a huff, I click the "Buy Upgrades" button out of idle curiosity. After grinding away for a few seconds it shows me this:
I forget how much I paid for the licence originally, but I think it was around £500, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less if I got it on a group buy. £905 for an upgrade simply isn't going to fly. If it were a vital tool that brought in huge flows of revenue, then it might be justifiable - it's all about return on investment, right? - but that isn't the case. The reality is that Trados has become less and less relevant to my work over the past few years.
It is a fact that when I started out freelancing full-time in early 2015, if a Japanese client wanted me to use a CAT tool, the only tool they ever asked me to use was "Trados", as they call it (never "Studio" for some reason). Here in early 2024, I have just been through an entire quarterly earnings season and I don't think I was sent a single Trados package. I did use Trados for three or four out of the 40-plus projects I tackled over the past four weeks, projects that were provided to me as Word files, but it wasn't required.
That doesn't mean my clients are not using CAT tools, because they're using them more than ever, but their tool of choice today is overwhelmingly Phrase (what until a year or so ago was called Memsource). When I first encountered Memsource I had a think about it and I decided that, rather than digging in my heels and insisting on Trados, I would tell my clients that I would have no objection at all to using this new tool. This made my clients happy.
It's made me happy as well. I like Phrase. I don't think there's any doubt that Trados is ultimately more capable (due to its plug-in functionality, for example) but I'm very seldom in a situation where I need to do something that Trados can do and Phrase cannot. On the contrary, in everyday usage Trados feels heavy and slow compared to Phrase. Everything takes half a second longer, and everything takes a couple of clicks more. This more nimble interface makes Phrase more pleasant to use from the translator's point of view.
But the freelancer is only part of the process. I imagine therefore that there must also be some kind of economic or functional advantage for the agency and the end client that induces them to use Phrase in preference to Trados. Maybe it is a simple issue of cost, or maybe the licensing terms are less punitive - I really don't know. What I do know is that if this phenomenon of preference for Phrase is being mirrored in other pairs and other territories, it strongly implies that Trados is in trouble.
For 20 years I worked in finance, and for most of that time my explicit mandate was to kick the tyres on the business models of the companies (stocks) in my sectors, and work out which ones, well, worked. Then I would tell fund managers which stocks I thought they should buy or sell. Company A is growing slowly, but has very high margins. Company B makes hardly any profit but is growing like Topsy and establishing a lead in new markets. Company C is distinguished by its high return on invested capital (sadly rare in Japan). And so on.
Once you've been doing this for a while you build a reasonable picture of the different business models that companies can use to add value over and above the cost of capital. Ultimately they are all variations on a small number of basic themes. So what is the business model of RWS (which acquired SDL a couple of years ago) in relation to Trados Studio? How do they plan to succeed?
No doubt if we had a member of RWS management here in this forum, they would spin us a good yarn. That's kind of the minimum you expect, because if management doesn't have some kind of plan that they can articulate well, they don't deserve to be management. That's their job. Conversely, the job of an analyst is to work out (1) whether the assumptions on which this plan is based are actually reasonable, and (2) whether management can actually execute - can they walk the walk as well as talk the talk? "Competitive moat" sounds good, until you find that there's no water in it and the barbarians are already at the gate. It's interesting, I note in passing, that market share doesn't seem to be mentioned explicitly in the RWS presentation from which this slide is taken. Studio itself is mentioned only once.
However, a significant difference between analysts and corporate managers is that most corporate managers only ever see such presentations being delivered by one company (their own). Analysts and especially fund managers get to listen to upbeat scenarios from hundreds or even thousands of companies.
And you know what? Those bullish visions are often not realized. Most companies get it wrong. They fail to hit this year's sales forecasts. The new factory that was going to cut costs takes so long to ramp that it actually increases costs. The technology for which they acquired that overseas company turned out to be worth only a fraction of what they thought. These disappointments find concrete expression in the form of lower sales, profit shortfalls, and thumping impairment losses. Analysts and fund managers have seen it all before. They are reluctant connoisseurs of human fallibility in the sphere of commerce.
I haven't bothered taking more than a cursory look at RWS' most recent filings, nor have I followed the company over time to see whether the SDL acquisition has panned out the way they thought it would. If I were an investor, the apparent disappearance of Trados from this part of the (potentially large and lucrative) Japanese market would be a canary in the coal mine for me. I would be making phone calls to the IR manager at RWS and wanting some reassurance that Japan was an isolated case. To reiterate: companies can and do get it wrong.
Around seven years ago, a representative of (pre-RWS) SDL irately accused forum members here on ProZ.com of undue skepticism about a newly launched SDL initiative, and told us we should use the opportunity to "engage" with the company. I pointed out to him that the onus to engage and to perform is on SDL, not on its customers.
SDL may be the leader in the sector now, I said, but in 2005 Nokia was the unassailable giant of the cellphone sector, and yet within a few years it had imploded. That didn't end up being anything more than a fleeting problem for any of Nokia's customers, but it was a substantial problem for Nokia and its employees. Think on that, I said portentously (or was it pompously?).
In Japan at least, Trados is no longer the Nokia of its market. Or maybe it is, in the sense that it seems to have faded to irrelevance, at least in the field of Japanese to English financial translation. I am only one person, and I can't claim to cover the entire Japanese market, so maybe Trados is still the CAT tool of choice at other agencies or other industries. I'm skeptical that is the case, because the end clients with which I work are of all different sizes, and hail from many different sectors.
Or maybe I'm not thinking broadly enough and the underlying issue is that, in an age of rampant machine translation, RWS has basically given up on Studio and is sunsetting it because it believes that other products will be the key to future growth. "Phrase can have the market," RWS might be thinking, "because that market isn't going anywhere". Why invest in a product for a sector that has gone ex-growth?
So it's going to be an interesting few years for Trados, but I kind of doubt that it's going to be interesting enough for me to pay £905 to upgrade to the latest version. Especially given that improvements in functionality in that latest version seem to be pretty superficial. If clients are no longer asking me to use Trados then compatibility is no longer a factor. I might as well buy CafeTran Espresso for a fraction of the cost and get a CAT tool that is being actively improved by a responsive developer.
But that is all in the future. For now I need to get this Trados deactivation sorted out. Having achieved very little in terms of work yesterday, I also need to complete several thousand characters today.
Dan
[Edited at 2024-02-17 22:07 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
On this morning's walk, I stopped halfway round to switch off my head torch for a brief while. Despite the lack of moon or stars I was able to see myself and my surroundings in the pre-dawn gloom. There was no obvious point of light on the eastern horizon, but we are getting there. By the time I got back to the house the sky was lightening noticeably. It is only another 11 days until the official outbreak of spring.
Yesterday I translated around 4,500 characters of financial Japanes... See more On this morning's walk, I stopped halfway round to switch off my head torch for a brief while. Despite the lack of moon or stars I was able to see myself and my surroundings in the pre-dawn gloom. There was no obvious point of light on the eastern horizon, but we are getting there. By the time I got back to the house the sky was lightening noticeably. It is only another 11 days until the official outbreak of spring.
Yesterday I translated around 4,500 characters of financial Japanese into English, despite my sons having a friend around to play video games in the living room at the far end of the house from the office. This resulted in great hilarity, to the extent where I could hardly think above the hubbub.
If you're interested, I use Quies Boules Natural Wax Earplugs to maintain my concentration and indeed my sanity. Previously I had used a variety of 3M synthetic disposable earplugs, but a midwife who does shift work (and who therefore absolutely needs to get sleep during the day) recommended these as being more comfortable. She was right, and they are at least as effective. If old-school wax was good enough to save the crew of Odysseus from the magical song of the Sirens, it's good enough to save me from the distinctly un-magical shrieks of gaming teenagers.
Today I have about 3,700 characters to translate. I would also like to resolve the Trados issue I complained about in my previous post, and get some software installed on the new PC in preparation for the transition.
Dan ▲ Collapse
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Linyphiidae intrusion | Feb 19 |
Only one star in the sky this morning, glimpsed between clouds. I know very little about the constellations, so I can only wonder what this one is.
Not the early one
That you can wish upon
Not the northern one
That guides in the sailors
Despite the lack of moon or stars, it is light enough towards the end that I am able to complete the final hundred yards with the torch off. I can't see much, but I can easily find my way up the track and into th... See more Only one star in the sky this morning, glimpsed between clouds. I know very little about the constellations, so I can only wonder what this one is.
Not the early one
That you can wish upon
Not the northern one
That guides in the sailors
Despite the lack of moon or stars, it is light enough towards the end that I am able to complete the final hundred yards with the torch off. I can't see much, but I can easily find my way up the track and into the garden. I would not have been comfortable doing that even two weeks ago. I am aware of the risk of a false spring, but with only 10 days to go until St David's Day it is hard not to be a little cheerful about the prospect.
After I get back from our morning walk, a client pings me to let me know that the 4000-character project that was due in today will be delayed by one day, and will be smaller than previously expected. I let them know that I am okay with both changes: in fact, smaller is better given the tight deadline.
That leaves me with 3000 characters to translate today for an end client peripherally associated with the semiconductor industry. I spend some time downloading materials from their website and storing them in the folder set aside for this particular company. The TM provided by the client seems to be not so much sparse as completely empty, and I like to have a variety of documents to which I can refer to during translation.
One of the things about Japanese financial translation into English is that most end clients have very set ideas about how they want things done, and they insist on following precedent. If in the past they have used "operating profit" instead of "operating income", you'd better make sure that you use "operating profit".
You might think that this would not be a major issue if a glossary were provided, but that is not the case. A few companies do indeed provide a glossary, but I find that this tends to hinder as much as help, because it is time-consuming to maintain such a file and most clients clearly perform such maintenance sporadically, if at all. There are often multiple conflicting definitions even within the glossary itself, and many proper nouns are simply not in the glossary.
This is annoying, but one cannot simply ignore the approach favoured by the client, so what I do is download a few recent documents and follow revealed preference. The beginning of every translation job is therefore partly a process of discovery. "How does this client like to format their references to fiscal year ends? Let's have a look... Oh, right." And so on.
The week ahead is looking quiet. A couple of thousand characters to do by Wednesday morning, a few thousand more by Friday morning, then two projects for submission by Monday next week, one small, one fairly large, totalling about 10,000-15,000 characters. If all goes well
I yelp involuntarily because something suddenly moves in my vision and startles me as I type, something between my eye and the monitor. I realize it is a very small money spider, unwisely trying to create some kind of web in the eight-inch gap between my overhead light and the shelf above and to the left of my head, and down (I think) to my microphone. I wait till it has climbed up to the light, and then firmly remove the web. Sorry, can't put that here. This is not in general a good place for you.
Anyway, as I was saying, if all goes well I will have some time to do non-work things this week. Obviously that includes provisioning the new PC, but may also perhaps some gentle gardening if this back injury permits.
Speaking of the garden, the camellia in the top hedge has produced flowers so perfect that when I first saw them in the vase on the dining table I thought for an instant that they were fake.
Onwards and upwards. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
This end client has a good selection of documents; I'm quite impressed.
A client has just emailed me asking for 2000 characters to be done by Thursday morning, a fairly sensitive document related to an assessment of the effectiveness of the board for a listed company. I can do that.
There is an issue with the resetting of my Trados licence, in relation to which I sent back a query to RWS. They have already responded to me this morning, which is good. I will try what the... See more This end client has a good selection of documents; I'm quite impressed.
A client has just emailed me asking for 2000 characters to be done by Thursday morning, a fairly sensitive document related to an assessment of the effectiveness of the board for a listed company. I can do that.
There is an issue with the resetting of my Trados licence, in relation to which I sent back a query to RWS. They have already responded to me this morning, which is good. I will try what they suggest.
I suspect they have a team finely tuned to react to licensing issues, as such problems can really kill the user's faith in a company. It's one thing to have your use of the software impaired by a bug of some kind, but it's another thing altogether to be prevented from using software (for which you have already paid) by a licensing problem.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Excel not excelling | Feb 20 |
A windy morning, promising drizzle. It is 6:49 AM when I start writing this, and outside the birds already singing in the dark. The season is changing.
Yesterday's presentation job was quite fragmented, without much running text. The task of ensuring consistency was made more difficult by the fact that the company has changed its structure somewhat since this time last year, which has in turn resulted in changes in proper nouns and so on. All told, slow and rather frustrating going,... See more A windy morning, promising drizzle. It is 6:49 AM when I start writing this, and outside the birds already singing in the dark. The season is changing.
Yesterday's presentation job was quite fragmented, without much running text. The task of ensuring consistency was made more difficult by the fact that the company has changed its structure somewhat since this time last year, which has in turn resulted in changes in proper nouns and so on. All told, slow and rather frustrating going, but I submitted it on time.
Because the 2000-character project I have on my plate for today is confidential in nature, there are no external documents to which I can refer, and there isn't really a TM either. The client has provided the source and target text for a similar job conducted last year, so I'm not working completely in the dark. I'm hoping this will proceed more smoothly than the project I have finished last night.
Today I am also expecting the hand-off of the job that should have come in yesterday but that was delayed. It is down in my schedule at 4000 characters but is likely (hopefully) going to be a fraction of that. I've got plenty to do.
Somewhat surprisingly I have received a letter from a governmental organization requesting that my tiny company take part in a survey. Okay. Something else for my to-do list this weekend.
The large project that a different client discussed with me last week has arrived, somewhat unexpectedly, in the form of an Excel file. I have spent a few minutes looking at the format and preparing the Bilingual Excel file type in Trados Studio.
It seems to more or less work but I'm not happy to see some scrambled characters in one of the columns when I open it in Trados. I try a bit of reformatting, which seems to work, but which will necessitate some careful reconstruction of the file on the return journey. We will have to see how it goes. The project manager also realizes that she has made a mistake with the delivery date for the first batch, which should be Thursday and not Friday. She asked me if I can deliver on Thursday. I tell her that I will do what I can but cannot guarantee it.
Now to get some work done. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13] > | To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator: You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request » In my craft or sullen art: JA-EN financial translation | Anycount & Translation Office 3000 | Translation Office 3000
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